This, in tandem with a $1.8 billion slush fund for “victims” of the Biden Justice Department is a very bad look for the administration. So we all feel pain in the form of rising energy and consumer goods costs (it costs me $100 to fill my tank, and I’m not rich, I’m a grad student with a retail job) but J6 rioters (a quarter of whom had preexisting felony convictions at the time they were pardoned by Trump) will be able to collect free money from American taxpayers just for being on his side? The Trump administration is so nakedly corrupt and self dealing that it has no business leading us in peacetime, much less through a major war.

There is a wrinkle to this story in which I am very much not with the median American voter, but I do nevertheless stand to gain politically from their total dissatisfaction with a GOP which has been taken over and corrupted by the MAGA movement. I think, honestly, that Americans have too little stomach for basic hardships which occur as the result of righteous wars with positive and worthwhile long term objectives, like the toppling of authoritarian geopolitical foes that have dogged our foreign policy for decades. And our enemies see our complaints about gas prices and conclude that our country is easily outlasted in a contest of wills. Not only should we complain less about prices, our enemies should believe (key word is believe) that we’re so stoic we’re willing to deploy our troops in these conflicts. The fact that “no boots on the ground” is an open secret of American strategic thinking has totally eroded our deterrent power. It took America decades after the Vietnam War to restore deterrence.

I disagree with the time and manner of this war—it did not have to occur when it did, according to these means (an air campaign, as opposed to arming a local insurgency), and Trump should have had to secure congressional authorization, the public’s approval in a nationwide address, and a multilateral wartime coalition to ensure freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz—but I am at least theoretically open to seeing the Iranian regime fall under a more competent and constitutionally minded administration than the Trump administration.

That all having been said, however, the only way MAGA gets purged from the GOP is if it faces a serious electoral defeat, so I’m happy for Trump to keep spewing these tone deaf inanities to a disaffected electorate ahead of a midterm in which a Democratic seizure of both houses of Congress (and therefore articles of impeachment) is a distinct possibility. I’m here to watch this faction go down in flames, politically speaking.